Today's Smalltalk 4 You looks at the Trailblazer tools in VA Smalltalk - specifically, how to load them and turn them on. In future screencasts, we'll take a closer look at them and explore their functionality. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.

You can also watch it on YouTube:

The basic browsers in VA Smalltalk are not your only option - you can also load the Trailblazer tools, which look and behave a little differently. Today we'll look at a few basics for Trailblazer, starting with how to get the tools loaded. First, open the Load features UI:

Next, scroll down, select Trailblazer, and move it to the right:

Note the message in the transcript - the Trailblazer tools are not on by default. To turn them on, go to the Tools menu, and toggle the Trailblazer option on:

Now, open the Configuration Maps Browser, and you'll see a different tool than what we've looked at previously:

Try opening the Application browser - you'll see that's different as well:

Remember that you can now toggle this on and off from the Tools menu - if you end up preferring the base tools, just turn Trailblazer off.

Today's Javascript 4 You. Today we look at a some more ways to use JQuery selectors to grab specific page elements and operate on them. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube.

We are pleased to announce the release of Seaside 3.0.5. This is a minor release for Seaside 3.0 that introduces Pharo 1.2 and jQuery 1.6 support. We recommend all users of Seaside 3.0 to update. A changelog is available

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.

You can also watch it on YouTube:

Today we'll be going back to the VASTGoodies.com site, and walking through the process of contributing code to the site. Using the tools we downloaded last time, this is pretty easy. First, we load the goodies into our image. Then, in a Configuration Maps Browser, select a configuration and note the two new items towards the bottom:

Select Edit Annotations to bring up a properties window. This is how you specify the various bits of information that appear on the website itself, giving information to other users about you:

Select the Project tab to fill in details about your project:

Now, hit the Ok button, and go back to the Configuration Map Browser. Select the Publish to VASTGoodies.com option in the menu:

You'll get a confirmation dialog - just hit Ok:

Now go back to the web browser and refresh the page - you should see your project in the list. That's all there is to it.

This week Dave Buck and I interviewed Cincom's Product Manager for Smalltalk, Arden Thomas. We spoke about the recent releases of VisualWorks and ObjectStudio, about the product roadmaps for both products. We also asked about the current inaccessibility of te NC product on the Cincom Smalltalk website - Arden had some answers for us on that score towards the end of the first part of the podcast. The discussion went for about an hour, so the podcast is split in two - part one today, part two next week. Enjoy!

You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes (or any other podcatching software) using this feed directly or in iTunes with this one.

To listen now, you can either download the mp3 edition, or the AAC edition. The AAC edition comes with chapter markers. You can subscribe to either edition of the podcast directly in iTunes; just search for Smalltalk and look in the Podcast results. You can subscribe to the mp3 edition directly using this feed, or the AAC edition using this feed using any podcatching software. You can also download the podcast in ogg format.

This week Dave Buck and I interviewed Cincom's Product Manager for Smalltalk, Arden Thomas. We spoke about the recent releases of VisualWorks and ObjectStudio, about the product roadmaps for both products. We also asked about the current inaccessibility of te NC product on the Cincom Smalltalk website - Arden had some answers for us on that score towards the end of the first part of the podcast. The discussion went for about an hour, so the podcast is split in two - part one today, part two next week. Enjoy!

You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes (or any other podcatching software) using this feed directly or in iTunes with this one.

To listen now, you can either download the mp3 edition, or the AAC edition. The AAC edition comes with chapter markers. You can subscribe to either edition of the podcast directly in iTunes; just search for Smalltalk and look in the Podcast results. You can subscribe to the mp3 edition directly using this feed, or the AAC edition using this feed using any podcatching software. You can also download the podcast in ogg format.

What do you do when you release a very successful (commercially speaking) game that nevertheless gets some raspberries from fans of the preceding game? You tread carefully:

"We have some new DLC that's upcoming that's going to try and address some of the comments and try and provide the fans with the things they're looking for, both the core fans and the new fans," BioWare boss Ray Muzyka told Eurogamer. "We're committing to making sure all the products in the franchise going forward are going to appeal to a wide audience, both the core and more."

While there were flaws in the game (reuse of maps, anyone?), it was enjoyable, and the story went somewhere interesting. Personally, I'm very curious to see where they take the core story - both in DLC and future games.

Today's Smalltalk 4 You shows you how to launch one VW image from within another VW image. This is useful for many tasks beyond multi-core support for distributed jobs; I use this to launch images sequentially from a "driver" image to do automated builds. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.

Facebook won't be needing it, apparently - at least mot on their mobile, html5 version of the site. Gizmodo reports that they are working on a way to route around Apple and the App Store within the bounds of what Apple allows on IOS:

Eighty outside developers are supposedly working on the project including those from companies like Zynga. Games and credits will be included so you can farm to your heart's content. And yes, it will supposedly land on Android, but the first target is iOS.

If that pans out, expect a lot of the excitement over iPad specific magazine apps to flow back to HTML5.

Update: Ironically enough, TechCrunch is now reporting that Facebook is, in fact, working on an iPad app. They still don't need Flash, but perhaps they've decided that HTML5 isn't enough :)

In a phone interview Tuesday, Numoto further said "since the launch of Office 2010 we've been selling a copy of Office every second." We'll do the math for you: that's about 31.5 million copies. The number could be higher, assuming Microsoft is counting only Office 2010 sales and not Office for Mac 2011, which came out late last year.

The standard desktop is still a big seller, regardless of how much hype you hear about everything else...

A federal judge in Las Vegas today issued a potentially-devastating ruling against copyright enforcer Righthaven LLC, finding it doesn't have standing to sue over Las Vegas Review-Journal stories, that it has misled the court and threatening to impose sanctions against Righthaven.

This is welcome news, but it doesn't change my baseline theory - copyright and patent law in the US are fundamentally broken. Instead of encouraging innovation, they are encouraging trolling.

Today's Smalltalk 4 You looks at specifying the prequisites for a configuration map. For the example map we created for the Counter application, we'll need to make sure that the SUnit library pre-loads. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.

You can also watch it on YouTube:

Today we'll be going back to the configuration map browser in VA Smalltalk. We created a Configuration Map to load our Counter application and tests together - but we didn't set it up to load the SUnit library if that wasn't already in the image. Today we'll go back and address that. First, open up the browser on the map:

To specify pre-requisites, we need to create a new edition. Right click on the 1.0 release, and select Create New Edition:

Move the cursor down to the expression pane below, and select Add from the context menu:

We have to specify a boolean expression here - if it evaluates to true, then the pre-requisite maps in the next pane will be loaded. Typically, we just set this directly to "true", but you can add more complex expressions:

Moving one pane to the right, we can now specify configuration maps that should be loaded before the one we are working on - and the load order for them. Pop up the context menu and select Add First. We only have one pre-requisite here - you can change the order if you have more:

In the window that pops up, move the libraries you need loaded from the left to the right, and then hit "Ok":

Now that we've specified the new pre-reqs, we need to release a version. Select the edition in the upper pane and right click - then select Version:

We have been doing all of this work without our library load. With the new edition selected, pop up the context menu again and select Load:

A small window will pop up to tell you what's about to be loaded, and in what order. Simply proceed by pressing "Ok":

And that's it - we've just loaded the new version, along with its pre-reqs.